Present And Non-Present By Day Lewis Annotations

We clearly see that the text is structured with so many binary oppositions like male/female, subject/object, consumer/consumed, life/death and most prominently present/non-present. It is also clear that the first term of each opposition is the privileged one, presented as the center. All other concepts are at the periphery. So the overt ideological project of the poem is: present moments is the most important one, utilization of the present is the best policy to defeat undefeatable power of time.

There are plenty of evidences presented in support of this ideological position. Time has been given great importance. It has “slow chapped power” (400. It can turn us to dust. Human being is too feeble “to make the sun stand still”. Not only this,

The words, phrases and the whole poem contradict and prove that there is no hierarchy in the oppositions and no side of binary opposition has privileged position. The speaker’s attitude to the ‘present’ at the centre and ‘non-present’ on the margin is contradictory because “The system of textuality extends infinitely and thus any belief in a moment of presence that would remain outside, precedent to, and governing this text is illusory” (Lewis 1). How does the speaker present the concept of the time? Time is divided into past, present and future. Only the present is existing, past is gone, future is yet to come. The moment he speaks of “desert of vast eternity” (24) this concept collapses. Can we separate the parts of eternity? Time is like a flight of an arrow, like running sun, like a flow of his speech. Can we pick up a present moment from the unending eternity? The sum of the flight of the arrow is the sum of presences. Every point of moment in the flow is present and non-present. The non-present is either past presence or future presence. So time is a series of presences. In the “deserts of vast eternity” too we have only presences. On the one hand he talks of eternal quality of time and on the he contradicts with his idea of limited time in the third stanza. The meaning of ‘present’ is possible only with the traces of past and future, if not why does he allude to Joshua who had stopped the sun so that the Israelites

The nature of language proves the meaning to be unstable and undecidable. Andrew Marvell’s poem also deconstructs itself from within. The author’s philosophy of time in the text is not universal but relative and contextual. What he claims to be the truth is only play of signifiers. Actually a text is nothing but a jumble of signifiers. The meaning a text claims is only an approximation. Communication is possible with approximation but the truth, the intended meaning; the signified can never be achieved. The indeterminacy of meaning persists in every effort to conformation in the poem. The truth is that there is no truth, no meaning and no ultimate signified. After all a text has no authority to speak only one truth because deconstruction has provided us an open ground for observing plurality